"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Another Typing Tutor

Last month I discussed Simon Baldwin's lesson-based typing tutor, Typist.
In response to that article
John Chapman sent me e-mail
concerning another typing tutor commonly used on FreeBSD systems. With his
permission, I'll quote from his message:

Dear Mr. Ayers:

In the Linux Gazette you recently expressed your interest in learning the
Dvorak keyboard, and I thought you might enjoy playing with the attached Tk
program called kp (=Keyboard Practice). It seems to be standard issue with
FreeBSD, but I've never seen it in any Linux distribution or archive.

It was written for Tk4.1, but works perfectly well with 4.2. I haven't
tried it with 8.0, though, so you might have to hunt up an older version of
Tk, if you don't already have one. To set it up, either untar it in
/usr/local/lib, or put everything into ~/bin, or whatever you like best. Then
edit the "executable" kp file so that the first line corresponds with your
version of wish (I have the 4.2 version in /usr/bin/wish4.2 on my Debian
system), and the "cd" line points to /usr/local/lib/kp, $HOME/bin, or wherever
you decided to plant the .tcl files. Copy kp to /usr/local/bin (or leave it
in $HOME/bin, if that's in your path), fire up X, invoke "kp", and off you go!

In the "options" menu you can switch between Dvorak and qwerty, and in the
"file" menu you can insert any ascii text file you wish as a model for
practice. The filter allows you to limit the text to words composed of
specific letters; swipe your finger over the keys in the home row, for
example, and the filter will pull out only those words made up of the letters
in the home row. Quite cleverly done.

If you decide that you want to use the Dvorak layout for Real Work(TM),
it's quite easy to have xmodmap load a Dvorak keymap for you, and switch back
to qwerty when you're done. Emacs can load a Dvorak keymap for you, too. And
some clever soul came up with the idea of aliasing "asdf" to "xmodmap
.kbd.dvorak" and "aoeu" (the same four keys!) to "xmodmap .kbd.default", so
that your whole family doesn't have to suffer :-) , but can switch back to a
"normal" layout with one simple key pattern. Presumably you could use the
same trick to reset the keymapping in console mode, too.

The "clever soul" referred to above is Don Reed (according to a later
message from John Chapman). Don Reed wrote an HTML file explaining his
approach to switching keyboard layouts on the fly; John sent me the file,
which you can read here.

Keyboard Practice is a useful and well-designed Tcl-Tk program; its ability
to use any text file as practice material is a nice touch. It was written by
Satoshi Asami <asami@cs.berkeley.edu>.
It's not just for practicing Dvorak typing; a menu-item lets a user switch to
QUERTY as well. Since the archived files occupy just a little over twelve
kilobytes, you can access them in this issue of LG
here. To try it out, just follow the instructions
in the above quoted message from John Chapman.

John also suggested a reference to the
Dvorak International Web-site, which
(although not updated recently) has links to most Dvorak sites on the net.
[Hyperlink removed 7-Dec-2001; the domain is now owned by another site. -Editor.]